AHEAD brings together experts from various disciplines to develop standards for the rigorous evaluation of artificial intelligence in healthcare, ensuring compliance with ethical and scientific regulations
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) hosted, from 30 to 31 January 2025, the kick-off meeting of the European project AHEAD (AI for Health: Evaluation of Applications & Datasets), coordinated by the Social Link Analytics Unit of the Life Sciences Department of BSC, under the MSCA-Staff Exchanges call. This project brings together 14 partners from various fields, including medicine and biomedicine, ethics, artificial intelligence (AI) development, gender dimension, law, sociology, psychology and software engineering, with the goal of establishing standards for the responsible implementation of AI in the healthcare sector by encouraging researcher mobility, skills development and innovation.
AHEAD responds to the rapid growth of AI and the lack of consensus on standardized approaches for its responsible application. Europe is actively pushing to regulate AI, particularly in high-impact societal applications such as biomedicine and healthcare. In this context, AHEAD aims to build a transdisciplinary and global community to address these challenges.
Together, the AHEAD community will bring complementary expertise and experiences to generate synergies leveraging existing practices and generating new ones whenever needed. The objective then is to implement those practices, building a transdisciplinary methodology and a platform to evaluate AI-based systems for biomedical and healthcare applications to ensure the compliance with legal, ethical, technical, scientific, and regulatory standards.
AHEAD will play a key role in improving OpenEBench (OEB), the ELIXIR benchmarking and technical monitoring platform developed by BSC. This project aims to adapt and optimize the platform to effectively respond to the demands of AI application evaluation, including models and datasets. In addition, the community will establish an Observatory to collect and select guidelines, best practices and principles for AI evaluation in biomedicine and healthcare considering different disciplines and domains.
Maria José Rementeria, leader of BSC’s Social Link Analytics team and research coordinator of the project, states: “AHEAD represents a crucial step towards a more transparent and reliable implementation of artificial intelligence systems and models in the healthcare sector. Our goal is to lay the foundations for the rigorous evaluation of AI models, ensuring their effectiveness and fairness in biomedical applications.”
This initiative will position AHEAD as a hallmark for promoting transparency and collaboration in the development of AI applied to healthcare, contributing to the definition of standards for its ethical and effective implementation in Europe.
About AHEAD
AHEAD (AI for Health: Evaluation of Applications & Datasets) is a European-funded project with a budget of €496.800,00 that started on 1 January 2025 and will last for four years. Coordinated by BSC (Spain) the project brings together a multidisciplinary consortium: BSC (Spain), UniTN (Italy), CERTH (Greece), BBMRI-ERIC (Austria), UH (Finland), HMO (Israel), NYU (United States), NBD (Spain), WBF (Switzerland), Lygature (Netherlands), NTT Data (Spain), IBMB Unibas (Switzerland), IBM Zurich (Switzerland) and IBM (Israel). In addition, the project collaborates with PRISMA and Barcelonaβeta, both based in Barcelona.
The AHEAD Project has received funding from the Horizon Europe Programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101183031 under call Horizon-MSCA-2023-SE-01